Origin

Eep is an onomatopoeiasound most commonly associated with the Apple Macintosh computer system alert sound "Wild Eep" which was introduced with the Mac System 7 OS, but removed in OS 9. According to Jim Reekes[1] (who was on the Mac OS sound development team at the time), to the best of his knowledge:

"When System 7 was being created, I collected new sounds. Some of them I made, and some of them I took from a contest. C.K. Haun[2] ([formerly in charge of Apple's Developer group and] now [as of March 30, 2006] in charge of Apple's Developer Technical Services group), submitted one which I think was Wild Eep. It was voted one of the keepers, and we gave him a CD-ROM drive. That's the best I can recall, as this was over ten years ago."

C.K. adds: It wasn't actually submitted by me [3] but by someone else. The sound was recorded for a simple game called Dropper[4] by my then-wife Lora Wray/Medina,[5][6] and can still be heard in the Mac OS X version of the game. This is a raw, unmodified sound that she made one evening while we were watching television, I immediately dragged her to my programming office to record that unique sound for later use. We divorced soon afterwards, and for years I was pestered by hearing her going "Eep!" at me from hundreds of computers on the Apple campus. This sound was even used in a Blockbuster commercial.[7]